Congratulations Marie Ireland

Congratulations to Marie Ireland who has had an exciting week. First she learned the excellent result of her PhD by Prior Publication. Second, she learned that the following manuscript based on a chapter in her PhD has been accepted for publication: 

Ireland, M., McLeod, S, & Verdon, S. (2023, in press). Eligibility determinations for speech and language services in United States public schools: Experiences and tensions. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 

Here is the abstract: 

Purpose: To examine school speech-language pathologists’ (SLPs) experiences regarding students’ eligibility for services in public schools within the United States. 

Method: Fifteen school SLPs participated in online focus groups to examine the complex nature of SLPs’ participation within decision-making teams and describe practice experiences in U.S. schools. SLPs worked in 1-10+ schools serving students from pre-K through 12th grade. Data were analyzed using Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) (Engeström, 2015). 

Results: School SLPs’ practice is impacted by rules, community, and division of labor in schools. Participants discussed: culture of the work setting; interaction between team members; desire to assist families and children; knowledge of regulations; evaluation practices; and the impact of poverty, cultural and linguistic differences. Nine major tensions were identified: SLPs’ concerns regarding outcomes of eligibility decision-making; documentation of educational impact; need for greater SLP empowerment and advocacy; complexities of students learning English as an additional language; overuse of the diagnosis of speech-language impairment (SLI) for students who do not qualify; administrators’ adherence to rules; parents’ involvement in decision making; disagreement between team members; and concerns about evaluation data for decision making. 

Conclusion: Within the schools, the CHAT framework was useful to identify tensions and opportunities for change at the individual and institutional level impacting team decision-making for eligibility, SLPs provision of services, and student outcomes. Acknowledgment of tensions and opportunities for change regarding students’ eligibility for services may guide public policy, pre-service training, and individual, local and national advocacy.

ECIR report 2022-2023

 Here is a summary of the outputs of the ECIR team in mid 2022-mid 2023 

• Grants: $5.7million awarded 
• Journal articles: 55 accepted + 16 submitted 
• Conference papers: 59 presented/accepted for presentation (+18 conference workshops/seminars etc) + 4 submitted 
• Book chapters: 29 published/in press + 1 submitted 
• Books: 3 published/in press + 1 under contract 
• Conference proceedings: 1 published
• High level of community engagement: 3 events hosted/training delivered, 22 media coverages, 4 media contributions, social media profile, 5 public lectures/presentations, 19 community consultations. 
• Members well recognised for their achievements: 3 individual and 1 group awards, leadership/membership of professional associations and editorial boards, invited working party and advisory participants. 
• 2 PhD completions and 2 PhD submissions by ECIR members, HDR support to 17 students.

Supporting educators’ emotional work with infants and their families around transitions at the start the day

The following paper has just been published.

Dolby, R., Friezer, B., Hughes, E., Page, J. & Meade, V. (2023) Supporting educators’ emotional work with infants and their families around transitions at the start the day, Early Years, 1 - 14, DOI: 10.1080/09575146.2023.2235911

Congratulations Belinda. Here is the abstract:

This article describes the professional development program, Baby Playspace Learning (BPL), and evaluates its capacity to build close relationships between educators, parents, their infants and infant peers during the morning transitions in ECEC settings. Using a pre-post design, video recordings of 20 (10 pre and 10 post) morning transitions were collected across a 12-month period and analysed for developing closeness, by measuring the frequency of triangular interactions, educators’ use of relational language and physical availability (sitting down, being still and holding infants in a curled position to relax). All measures of closeness increased significantly post-test, indicating that BPL created more opportunities for building closeness between all parties. BPL can enhance educator professionalism by showing educators how to engage in practices that help them to realise close relationships in a group setting. This gives parents, infants and infant peers the experience of belonging to a secure base culture where closeness is valued.

Statistical learning or phonological universals? Ambient language statistics guide consonant acquisition in four languages

 The following paper has just been published.

Contreras Kallens, P., Elmlinger, S., Wang, K., Goldstein, M., Crowe, K., McLeod, S., & Christiansen, M. (2023). Statistical learning or phonological universals? Ambient language statistics guide consonant acquisition in four languages. In I. M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 3290-3296). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3wj6767p

Congratulations Sharynne and Kate. Here is the abstract:

What predicts individual differences in children’s acquisition of consonant production across languages? Considerations of children’s development of early speech production have traditionally emphasized inherent physiological constraints of the vocal apparatus that speakers generally have in common (i.e., articulatory complexity). In contrast, we propose a statistical learning account of phonological development, in which phonological regularities of the ambient language guide children’s learning of those regularities in production. Across four languages (English, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean), we utilized recent meta-analytic dataset of age of consonant acquisition spanning 28 studies. High-density measures of children's ambient language environment from over 8,000 transcripts of speech directed to over 1,000 children were used to assess how well the frequency of consonants in childdirected speech predict the age of consonant acquisition. Our results suggest that both frequency and articulatory complexity are related to age of acquisition, with similar results found for English, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean. Consonants heard frequently by children tended to be incorporated into their production repertoires earlier and consonants heard less frequently are incorporated into production repertoires later in development. We discuss future directions that incorporate a statistical learning pathway towards learning to produce the sound patterns of the ambient language.

Sheena Elwick and Lysa Dealtry publish ORICL feasibility study

 Congratulations ECIR members Sheena Elwick and Lysa Dealtry on publication of the article “Feasibility and potential benefits of the Observe, Reflect, Improve Children's Learning (ORICL) Tool: Perspectives of infant-toddler educators” in the Australasian Journal of Early Childhood.

ORICL is a new tool for Australian early childhood education and care policy-makers, practitioners, and service providers to support infant–toddler educators to observe, reflect on, assess, and improve the quality of individual children’s learning experiences.

ECIR successes in 2022

ECIR successes in 2022

• 5 grants (+3 in submission)

• 2 books (+ 2 books in preparation)

• 16 book chapters

• 29 journal articles

• 37 conference presentations

• 23 HDR students (PhD, Masters, Honours) supervised by ECIR members

Congratulations and thank you everyone.